A communication-efficient leader election algorithm in partially synchronous systems prone to crash-recovery and omission failures

Abstract

Leader election is a key service for many dependable distributed systems. It eases the consistent management of replicas in current highly available computing scenarios. This paper presents a new leader election algorithm for crash-recovery and omission environments, in order to support fault-tolerant agreement protocols, e.g., Paxos. As a novelty with respect to previous works, our algorithm tolerates the occurrence of both crash-recoveries and message omissions to any process during some finite but unknown time, assuming that eventually a majority of processes in the system remains up forever and stops omitting messages among them. Also, the proposed algorithm does not rely on stable storage and is communication-efficient, i.e., eventually each process of the well-connected majority communicates only with the elected leader.